The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 4

  It hadn’t occurred to her that his ship meant so much to him, and yet his voice was as quiet and warm as if he was speaking about a person whom he cared about deeply. As if he was joined to it, like she was with the shark.

  She tried to imagine how she would have felt if Trawter had ordered her to attack another shark, one linked to another Seawatch operative. To kill a swift hammerhead or a fierce tiger or one of the lovely long-finned threshers with their tails that could knock a boat over with one slap, to kill a shark that someone else needed and trusted. The thought made her heart clench painfully. She would have done so, of course, or at least tried to—Seawatch could tolerate failure but would never countenance disobedience—but she would have hated every moment of it, and would have wanted to die herself afterwards.

  Now she might have to do something similar to Darok Juell. His ship wasn’t a living creature but it obviously meant a great deal to him, and she could no longer be indifferent to her duty.

  But maybe she wouldn’t have to do it. If they passed through the Strait of Mists, they would be approaching Lastland from a direction the Turean pirates didn’t expect. If they succeeded, she wouldn’t have to destroy his ship or risk harming her shark—and best of all, he wouldn’t know about the order she had been given.

  That’s a few too many ifs…

  “And there’s another reason I want to take the strait,” Darok said. “I think you can keep this a secret. The Admiralty outfitted a ship to look like Daystrider and she was sailed to the naval shipyards. She departed with a lot of pomp and circumstance, taking the exact route you mentioned.”

  “But that won’t fool any pirates who get close enough.”

  “Oh no, but it wasn’t meant to. The Admiralty knows there’s a Turean spy on the Greater Horseshoe, so they fed him this bait.”

  So the false ship would be sailing south. Both Lastland and the Strait of Mists were due east, as the albatross flew. Yerena was cautious by nature, but hope flared like a small bright flame as she saw what was likely to happen.

  “That might draw some of the Turean galleys away from the blockade,” she said.

  “Exactly. Even if it doesn’t, the false Daystrider will be sadly destroyed in one of those freak storms.” He sighed and shook his head. “That will set the pirates’ minds so much at ease.”

  “We’ll take you through the strait,” Yerena said, and only realized once she said it that she was smiling.

  “I thought you would.” He grinned back, a spark of amusement warming his eyes and deepening the laugh lines, fine as woodgrain, at their corners.

  His smile was so open and easy that Yerena felt her mouth straighten, the muscles of her face settling back into their usual poised stillness. She wasn’t used to people who displayed their emotions, and she had to be careful not to do the same thing. It was a relief when he rolled the map up again.

  “May I take you to your cabin?” he said.

  Jash Morender met with her captains in a cabin topside of Dreadnaught, but two of the people invited were not captains. Quenlin Fench was present, seated at the foot of the table, and no one looked at him.

  She could understand that. When Quenlin had first ridden into Turean waters on a whale’s back, he had been a fascinating anomaly, and then there was the fact that he had abandoned their enemies. The brightest and best of Denalay, and he wanted nothing to do with that land. Jash had imagined a dozen different uses for him at the time.

  None of them had panned out. Quenlin wasn’t the vanguard of a wave of more defections, nor were his peculiar talents very useful so far from Denalay. He could not send his killers two thousand miles away and still expect to control them easily, nor did Jash trust him enough to let him go with them. Worse, when the captain of the aptly named Masterless fell overboard in what Jash felt sure was a drunken stupor, folk whispered that Quenlin had murdered him somehow. Shadows in the sea became spies who could carry men’s words to a Denalait’s ears. He was becoming a liability, and she knew he knew it.

  At least he had the good sense not to dress like one of them, because the captains would have taken that as an insult. Instead he wore black-and-white skins over fine silk, making him an odd hybrid of seahunter and aristocrat. He didn’t carry a blade, but she supposed he didn’t need one when his real weapons were nearly thirty feet long.

  Nion Vates had no weapons at all, but Jash knew he was nowhere near harmless. Nothing mattered to him as much as his faith, and he was disturbingly good at getting ordinary, sensible people to fall under his sway. Still, she could hardly blame them, considering what had happened to the Denalait armada after Nion had given a sacrifice to the gods of sky and sea.

  She had offered him a place on Dreadnaught both to keep him under some semblance of control and to win over the Vates clan, who held Copperstone and Hag’s Hill and Myrrh Isle. That had worked, but Jash was often reminded of how differently she and Nion saw the gods. To her, they were entities which could be approached for businesslike transactions—give a gift and receive a storm—but to him, they seemed to be cosmic puppetmasters using people to serve their own ends. Not that it mattered. No matter how devout her men might be in the fane, they knew who made the better captain.

  The best captain, of all those seated at her table. She wore no finery and no jewelry either, but twin shortswords hung from her belt and most of the people present had seen her fight with those.

  Her aide filled their goblets. The wine was from Scorpitale, dashed with spices and served with an iron ring in the bottom of each goblet, and the captains drank to their victory, drank to freedom in the islands and drank to a sea without end, a vision of the plentiness and prosperity that would be theirs someday.

  Then the goblets were empty and Jash told them her news.

  “The fortress on Lastland has walled its gates with stone, and there are too many defenders on the battlements.” Her men could have carried the catapults off Dreadnaught and the slopes of Lastland were rich in rocks, but getting close enough to the walls meant being within arrow range. “We need subterfuge instead.”

  “How d’you mean?” Stamat Corving frowned. “They wouldn’t take in anything from you.”

  “I wouldn’t take in anything from me,” Jash said dryly. “No, I had the Honeycomb in mind.”

  The Honeycomb was the south face of Lastland, where the cliffs dropped away almost vertically into a foaming sea and were riddled with hollows. Above, the fortress crouched like a stone beast, but the wall to the south was undefended. Jash had once sent two men to climb up the Honeycomb, because if they could reach the southern wall, they could—

  That was as far as she and they had gone before long slender arms, black in the moonlight, burst from the stone holes and seized the men. The arms were twelve, twenty, thirty feet long, unjointed and slick and sinuous. One of the men had time to scream before he was pulled into a hole in the cliff face, and neither of them came out again.

  Jash had no idea what lurked inside the Honeycomb, but the Iron Ocean was home to all manner of beasts. Or the Denalaits could have brought that monster with them, leaving it to grow fat on whatever it could snatch from the air. And the sea, she thought when she saw waves frothing into lower hollows.

  On the other hand, a beast that devoured men might find coral less palatable, and she would rather lose that than throw away more Turean lives. She listened as her captains argued against any assault on the Honeycomb—what scared them most, she knew, was that no one had seen the body of the beast within the rock, only its arms—and finally one of them asked how she planned to do it. He was Veck Ithane the Shellhand, who commanded Rorqual. A double-bladed axe rode his back.

  “I’m glad you asked.” She turned to her aide. “Pass the word for Arvius and the creature.”

  “What creature?” Grihan Vates said in a low voice to his cousin, but Nion only fished the iron ring from his goblet and stared through it with eyes so unfocused he might have been trying to see the future. Not for the first time, Jash won
dered about his sanity. She had the goblets filled again while the captains waited, but as the wine levels sank she knew Arvius was taking entirely too long to obey her order.

  If he had let the coralhost go, she would have him keelhauled. He’d done his work as competently as he did everything, sawing the man’s skull open, then removing and discarding what was no longer needed before transplanting the brain coral into the cavity, but he’d hated every moment of the process and had told Jash so. She had retorted that if he wanted to be the kind of physician who took fine oaths and felt compelled to treat her enemies with kindness, Denalay was only two thousand miles away. “You’re free to start swimming at any time.”

  A knock on the door was followed by one of Arvius’s apprentices, who pulled off his cap at once. “Captain, sir. Last I saw Master Arvius, he was going into his quarters. I called outside his door but he doesn’t answer.”

  “Where is it?” Jash said, struggling to keep the tension from her voice.

  “Went for a swim, sir. It’s coming aboard.”

  Jash supposed the surgery had been a success if the coralhost was well enough to swim, but before she could say anything, her aide’s eyes widened. Since he stood just outside the cabin, she couldn’t see whatever was in his line of sight as he tore off his jacket and held it out.

  The coralhost walked past him to stand naked and dripping in the doorway. Jash heard one of the captains rise out of his chair and Quenlin choked on a gulp of wine. She got up too, but unhurriedly, as if she had expected such an appearance all along.

  The lack of clothes showed no changes about the coralhost’s body—at least not on the surface. The head was another matter entirely. Gills slit the surface of the neck. Obviously the coral did not want its container to come to any harm, and now that vessel would be fine beneath the waves. The shaved head and the sutures along the healing incision looked grotesque, and a nub of coral poked its way out of the forehead, pale as new horn.

  “As you all can see,” Jash said, desperately aware that she had to make this seem normal, “I have created a coralhost, and it can breathe underwater…all the way through the Honeycomb. The sunken passageways aren’t likely to be guarded, except by the beast.” She spoke directly to the coralhost for the first time. “It’s large and tentacled and it eats men. Can you kill it?”

  “I can kill anything.”

  “Then do so, but when you enter the Honeycomb you’ll take poppy juice with you, all we can spare. Some of those passages will lead into the fortress. Once you enter it, keep yourself hidden and sweeten their water supply. Pull their banner down when you see the effects taking hold, and we’ll come over the battlements. Do you understand?”

  The coralhost nodded, turned and left. The aide, who still held his jacket in one hand, swallowed hard and closed the door.

  “More wine?” Jash asked.

  “That creature,” Nion Vates said slowly.

  “Is a coralhost. The seaspeakers of old knew brain coral was sentient, but they had no way of giving it hands to do their bidding. Until now.” No Turean had the inborn skills certain Denalaits did, the ability to command the beasts of the ocean, so they made do with what they did have.

  “Captain,” Haraden Stylor said, “your plan’s success, gods willing, will add one more island to the Archipelago without too many of our blood lost for it, but what does the—the coralhost want in return for its help?”

  Jash had no idea. The making of more hosts, perhaps, as the brain budded? That was one reason she had wanted the Denalait defenders of the castle drugged rather than slaughtered.

  “Whatever it asks for, I’ll deal with that when it returns,” she said. “We have other matters to consider at present.” Time to switch targets. “I’ve had word from a man on Cape Claw. The warship Daystrider docked there to take supplies on board before sailing east.”

  “One ship?” Cax Parue said. She was the only other woman at the meeting, and she spurned leather and sealskin for a jerkin heavy with thick, overlapping flakes of nacre. It was the only thing beautiful about her, because her teeth were crooked and her face as hard as Steel Rain, the galley she commanded.

  “The vanguard of a force,” Stamat Corving said, but there was no certainty in his voice.

  The Shellhand shook his head. Cords of white hair swayed with the movement, and he clasped his goblet with both hands, a habit since he had recovered from Denalait torture. Every fingernail had been torn out years ago and they had not grown back, but the scallop shells embedded in the empty places were far harder. Veck was harder too.

  “Use your wits, Corving,” he said. “They don’t have the numbers to invade in force.”

  “Then they’re sending just the one ship.”

  Veck laughed. “You think one ship would be able to break a blockade?”

  “Depends on the ship, doesn’t it?”

  Jash glanced at Quenlin. As the Denalait, he should have had a better idea what they wanted, but he frowned instead.

  “Did your man say what kind of shark was accompanying the ship?” he said.

  Jash shook her head, guessing the shark had stayed in deeper waters away from the docks. “I want to know why they would send a single ship into the Iron Ocean.”

  Quenlin looked blank. “I’m not sure,” he said finally, seeming to realize she wasn’t the only one watching him with growing disdain. “A raid on some southern island?”

  “They wouldn’t have sent that ship for something so petty,” Jash said. Daystrider was second only to Hawk Royal in the Denalait fleet, so she couldn’t dispatch just any one of her captains to deal with the threat. There wasn’t much point in throwing lives or vessels away, if warship met galley in the open sea.

  “Then send a scout to meet them,” Quenlin said. A snort of scornful laughter was the Shellhand’s reply, but Quenlin ignored it and continued. “Someone you trust—some woman. A man can shake off the trappings of chivalry, but he’s still likely to be distracted by a girl in a wet dress. Mark her face with ink and I’ll tell her what to say. If Daystrider’s captain believes she’s a Seawatch operative, he won’t ask too many questions, and she can find out what you want to know.”

  Jash thought it would be very pleasant to see the Denalaits brought down by their own system, by their slavish obedience to it. The whole purpose of the Tureans was freedom. She had no intention of living by landmen’s laws, sending taxes or tribute to cities not even in the Archipelago. Or, for that matter, being governed by a…thing…called the Unity. She could make no sense of that at all; were mainlanders so desperate to be ruled over?

  Whether they were or not, the Tureans never would be.

  “That will take too long.” Veck was no longer laughing. “We can give her a boat and men to row it, but by the time they reach that ship it will have sailed beyond Scorpitale.”

  “My whales will take her to Scorpitale in less than a week.” Quenlin swirled the wine in his goblet so the iron ring clinked softly inside. “And four of them will tear any shark apart.”

  The captains looked skeptical and Grihan Vates muttered that any woman who offered herself up for such a scheme had best choose a new mother for her children, but Jash nodded. “The woman won’t be alone. Captain Luliok of Masterless will sail south as well.” Not only was that galley rumored to be ill-fated, but she suspected Luliok, whose ambition was well-known, had sent his drunken predecessor stumbling overboard. Let him deal with Daystrider.

  “Your pack will bring the woman to him once she’s learned enough about the Denalaits’ purposes and numbers,” she said to Quenlin. With nothing more to discuss, the captains took their leave and Quenlin went out as well, but Nion Vates stayed in his chair.

  “An abomination went out from this ship today to do your bidding,” he said.

  Jash’s temper strained like a wolf on a leash and she fought it down, because on the rare occasions in the past when she had lost control, Nion had always won. “When we are thirsty and far from the sea, we drink landwater.
This is no different.”

  “We are not far from the sea now.”

  “Then pray to the gods and we’ll see what delivers that island to us. Or do the gods need more sacrifice before they consent to save us?”

  “I do pray, and no, they have not asked for sacrifice. It’s the other way around, Captain. They will give us a gift.”

  “A gift?” Jash raised her brows. That was new, not that she believed a word of it. “What kind of gift?” She could have used one Denalait fortress, in ruins and missing a banner.

  Nion told her, and she regretted asking. He was a link between men and gods, he said, a mediary between the Tureans of the Archipelago and the powers of the sea and sky. All of which she agreed with. But he claimed there had to be another link.

  “In the beginning the wind moved over the face of the water, and the ocean swelled to bring forth land,” he said. “Two to breed, two to lead. Do you understand? The prophets of the people must be two as well, and I am only one.”

  “Thank the gods.”

  Nion ignored that. “Just as the thunder of the sky speaks through me, the fury of the sea will speak through another. Once I believed you might be her, Captain, but I was wrong. Now I know the truth. The gods will send us that gift instead.” He left, boots scuffing softly against lye-scrubbed planks.

  Jash rubbed her forehead wearily. The man was growing madder by the day, and each time he called himself a link, she remembered the Scorpitale saying that a link was just one drop of a chain. Yet he could be useful when she needed a wind to fill her sails, and at least he hadn’t fixated on her as his counterpart. If he came after her with a “two to breed” purpose, she’d cut it off.

  He was the least of her problems, anyway. She had to find a loyal woman who could pass as a Seawatch operative, and even before that, she needed to see why Arvius hadn’t obeyed her order.